Lately, I’ve been struggling to stay true to my own advice for pursuing a life of Multiple Careers. 3 youtube channels, a neglected blog, and a book in the works have kept me working until almost midnight. But I’m powering through, not the least because we’re past half-year (only 4 full months to go in 2022) and the clock is ticking, mercilessly.
If you’re also behind with your goals, I know exactly how you feel. If you’re an ambitious, rather conscientious person, then feeling behind on your goals is extremely anxiety-inducing. Your mind is racing and you’re agitated, but there’s only so much you can do in a day.
In the end, it boils down to choice. And you do have a choice, even though it may be hard to see. There are 3 things that you can decide to do when you’re faced with a pile of goals and 4 months left (or 2 months if you’re reading this later!). And I’m going to demonstrate this using the example of my book, and my youtube channels.
1. Double-Down
Unbelievable. Telling me to double-down is like telling me to switch from running on flat terrain to an inclined path when I’m already out of breath. But yes, sometimes in life you have to fight for the things that matter to you, even though it’s painful. And to do that, something’s gotta give.
For me, this year, it’s my book that I have to finish writing, no matter what. And it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. So I’ve changed from a person who relaxes with Netflix and youtube videos after dinner, to a person who turns on the laptop and continues hammering away at the keyboard.
Look at your list of goals, and if you don’t already have one, I encourage you to write down all of your goals on one sheet of paper. That’s the only way you can get a good overview of your goals and put things in perspective.
Which of these goals, in the different areas of your life including career, family, relationships, finance, health, etc. is non-negotiable? Which would make you hate yourself if you didn’t achieve them?
For me, it’s writing that book. Starting it was a breeze until I got to a bottleneck where I desperately tried to reduce a 100,000+ words long manuscript to the recommended 50,000-75,000 words for a non-fiction book. It’s painstaking but very rewarding. Now it’s August, soon I’m going on a much-needed 3-week long vacation, and in the meantime also need to stockpile some videos to schedule on my 3 channels.
After finishing pitying myself, I re-centered my priorities and decided to double-down on the book. Instead of spending 10 hours per week on it, I’m now spending 20 hours per week, literally doubling down. My stress levels will rise for a while but imagining the end of the year when I hold my finished manuscript in my hands, I know it will be all worth it.
What are you going to prioritize and double down on, and what are you going to sacrifice for it.
2. Shrink
As the amount of attention and energy I have is limited, I had no other choice than to shrink some of my goals. It’s a bit of a compromise, as by doing this you’re adjusting your initial parameters. Say, for example, that at the start of the year you had a fitness goal of swimming twice a week, and doing 20 laps each. But now you realize that it’s just not sustainable.
If you want to make progress on all fronts, then there’s no other way than to tone down that goal. Halve it, shrink it. This could mean, that instead of running 20 laps, twice a week, you’d only do this once a week.
If you’re an ambitious person, this might seem like a tough thing to do. You might feel that you failed in some way. But that’s not necessarily the case. It might just be that you overestimated yourself to begin with, that you were over-ambitious.
And that’s exactly what I was, over-ambitious, overestimating what I could get done. So I made the difficult decision to tone down my expectations for my youtube channels. I just couldn’t keep up with the volume and production quality I initially wanted. And I was not in a position to outsource parts of the process yet.
So I reshuffled my work plan until I arrived at an optimal distribution of videos to be launched for each of my channels. I ended up with a ratio of about 0.5:1:8 for my Multiple Careers Podcast channel, Multiple Careers Channel, and Living in Canada (LIC) Channel, respectively. I had very pragmatic reasons for spending disproportionately more time on my LIC channel. It recently experienced a growth spurt in terms of views and most importantly, income. A lifeline for a freelancer.
Shrinking your goal requires a lot of acceptance. As it’s a compromise between different goals, you’ll get a sense of satisfaction at the end of the year, that you’ve made progress on multiple fronts, and didn’t leave any goals behind. But nothing requires more self-admission than the next thing.
3. Eliminate
Sometimes, you just need to swallow your pride, or your ambition, and eliminate some things. Go back to your list of goals and ruthlessly strike things off of it. This is the realistic approach.
If you feel that by compromising you’ll end up not making any meaningful progress with anything, then eliminating your goals lower on the list is a sensible choice.
Rank-order your goals according to priority, and delete the lower 20%-50% or even 70% of goals. That way you free up time, energy, and attention for the 30% most important goals. Combine that with nr. 1, doubling down, and you’ll finish this year with flying colors.
Being successful at a few things that are meaningful will feel so rewarding, that you might even forget about all your other goals by that time.
Eliminating goals is an intentional step, it’s different than just forgetting or ignoring your goals. If you pretend to forget your goals, it will just make you feel crappy. The reason is that you have not really dismissed them. Instead, they just become a monster under your bed. Whenever you think of these goals, you feel bad about ignoring these.
But when you eliminate a goal, you gain closure. You tell yourself: “Nope, I’m NOT going to work on this because I will use the time to work on that other, more important things”.
So that’s what I did with one of my goals for the Multiple Careers Podcast. Before the turn of this half-year, I enthusiastically launched a series of guest podcasts, where I interviewed people who made complete career changes, quit their jobs to work on their personal projects, and who pursued a second career. We talked about their challenges, and learnings, and I loved it.
But it took an awful lot of time to get guests on the podcast, edit it, etc. So just recently I admitted to myself that I just couldn’t do it, not this year at least. I struck it off my list and had some peace. With that, I could divert my energy to doubling down on my book, as well as distributing what’s left to my other goals.
My book embodies the same kind of approach. While at times we have to put on our idealist hat, dream, and envision things, at other times we need to be pragmatic.
In that book which still needs a good title, I’ll introduce my Multiple Careers system. It will help you to map out your desires and dreams over the long-term, whether that’s moving countries or making a complete career change, while at the same time making the connection to the present. That’s when you put on your strategy hat, and tactical hat, get your hands dirty and get things done.
Time is short and long at the same time. 4 months might not seem like a lot, but if well-spent, is enough to get meaningful things done. So, make your choice: Where will you double down? What goals will you shrink? And which goals will you eliminate? And with that, cheers to a productive 4 more months!
